For months now, authorities charged with keeping Europe safe from Islamist extremist violence have been sounding the alarm. In May, Dutch security services warned that the terrorist threat from Islamic State to Europe had increased. The same month, the French interior minister said the risk of Islamist terrorism was rising again and that his own country was being targeted, as well as its neighbours.
In recent days, these pessimistic forecasts appear to have been vindicated. France is deploying 7,000 extra troops on to its streets after a teacher was fatally stabbed on Friday in an attack that Emmanuel Macron condemned as “barbaric Islamic terrorism”. The suspected attacker swore an oath of allegiance to IS in an audio recording on his phone shortly before the killing, prosecutors have said.
After the shooting on Monday of two Swedish football fans in Brussels by a 45-year-old known to security services and suspected of radical sympathies, Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, said his country and its interests were threatened as “never before in modern times”.
Since the dark days of the intense wave of terrorist attacks that swept Europe between 2014 and 2017, Islamist militant violence has been forced from the headlines by more pressing security threats: the increasingly vocal activism and attacks by the far right, efforts to subvert democracy in Germany, economic distress that undermines institutions and so threatens chaos, as well, of course, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
When there have been attacks attributed to Islamist extremism, they have been relatively low-level, if often tragically lethal. In 2020, another teacher was stabbed to death in France, and in Vienna four people were killed by an Austrian citizen who had once tried to travel to Syria to join IS. These and most similar attacks were by “lone actors”, operating independently of any big organisation but inspired by the same broad ideologies.
This underlines how important the existence of the so-called caliphate established by IS had been to the earlier wave of terror. Many of the big attacks of 2015 and 2016 owed their appalling effectiveness to the ability of terrorist organisers to plan, communicate and train in the relative safety of the group’s enclave in Syria and Iraq. The apparent success of IS appealed to thousands of young Europeans and simultaneously provided a destination for them. The combination was devastating.
Several years have passed since the destruction of the caliphate, and IS still controls some territory in the Middle East, Afghanistan and particularly in Africa’s Sahel. Though there is evidence the group is still targeting Europe, the logistical barriers are considerable and the group struggles to attract potential recruits outside a narrow local constituency. Only two of 16 completed attacks in the EU in 2022 were “jihadist”, according to Europol.
Yet the threat has not gone away entirely. There have been dozens of abortive plots, with hundreds of suspects detained over recent years. Often this goes unnoticed. Few paid much attention to an alleged terror plot by a Tajik IS cell that targeted US and Nato military bases in Germany in 2020, or the twin police operations targeting IS financiers and online recruiters in Spain in 2022. More recently, five people were arrested in early April in Sweden on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act in retaliation for the burning of a copy of the Qur’an at a rally in Stockholm some months earlier. Two more suspected recruiters were arrested in Italy on Tuesday.
Individual incidents can spark a specific threat against a particular country, as the series of Qur’an burnings in Sweden have perhaps now demonstrated. Big crises in the Middle East raise the threat to the whole of Europe. Every war in Gaza has led to a rise in extremist activism on the continent. This current conflict is no different.
For the moment, the risk of a big atrocity is low. Such attacks take months to plan and cannot be organised in haste. But as one security official said last week, “it doesn’t take much for someone to tape some kitchen knives to their hands”. This will be the fear as the crisis in the Middle East continues and possibly intensifies.
